The EU and US tried desperately to destroy Putin’s Russia but instead, it is now Saudi Arabia that is near collapse. Shock, Laughter Greet Plan for Saudi Arabian Sale of the Century as the royals struggle to save themselves from bankruptcy. My parents were once hired by the Saudi royals and while over there, ended up leaving the country in a rage when a Saudi royal deliberately ran over a European woman who was crossing the street because she didn’t wear a veil as she crossed from my mother’s compound to her compound in the Netherlands sector. The State Department was called on the carpet by the royals who were fearful my mother would talk about how evil they are. Well, the rulers of SA are one of the evilest on earth! If any country deserves to see its rulers overthrown, this is the #1 along side North Korea.

Of course, NATO’s all-important oil exporting business with SA means we are supposed to not notice how evil the rulers are even as SA men attack the US and kill thousands of people say, on 9/11. SA began an oil war with Iran and Russia to deliberately depress world oil prices hoping this would destroy both nations. This business required both collapsing after one year. This didn’t happen. Instead, Saudi Arabia is collapsing!

This is because the government there is highly unpopular and keeps any power by handing out huge welfare payments to the public which are now being drastically cut. There is no way out of this self-made trap. The only way SA can raise the price of oil is to cut pumping oil. This will, in turn, make both Russia and Iran much stronger. While revenues flowing to SA fall even further…the EU plan to cut Russian energy use has failed since the EU is now going into a recession thanks to Wahhabi terrorists who want the world to look like the hideous theocracy in SA.

I happen to know some of the SA royals personally since they hung out with my mom and dad when I was a lithesome teenager. My parents warned me to be careful around them yet had some live with them for a while during the late 1960’s in Tucson. I have a strange relationship with them all. Many years ago, in 1973, when I was living next to the University of Arizona, I had this terrifying dream of a military jet crashing into my home. I immediately pulled up stakes and left Arizona for New York City.

A few years later, while my parents were standing on the roof of their building at the University, a military jet in trouble skimmed over the roof and smashed into my old neighborhood right where my home once stood and blew up, killing people on the ground while the pilot, a Saudi royal family member, bailed out safely. To say that I don’t trust or like the Saudi royals is an understatement.

This is one of the ugliest and most vile regimes on earth. They go beyond the ‘wear Mao suits all the time’ hysteria of communist China under Madame Mao. Americans are told over and over again, they are our good buddies. This is ridiculous. The goal of the Saudi royals is to enslave us all and force everyone to live in this noxious, nasty way they cooked up. It is a menace to society, they directly menace my civil rights and right to survive. I consider them my enemies, not friends. Letting 0.01% of the women to vote there was a total farce especially since the only women voters were Saudi royal clan women! It was a cynical front, not a step forwards. And men ‘voting’ is the same since these are like the ‘votes’ in Cuba or Maoist China, etc. A farce, not real.

So, Mohammad bin Salman‘s remark about selling shares in the clan’s monopoly is being greeted as unbelievable news but I think it is a sign of desperation as the house of cards collapse. We should all thank PUTIN for this. He is directly responsible for confronting SA on the battle ground as well as in oil markets and besting them. Putin is a master chess player. Our leaders can’t play monopoly, much less, chess, with him.

Ten years ago, Matt Simmons published a remarkable book, Twilight in the Desert. Simmons, who has passed away since then, was a financial analyst for the oil business and investors. His job would have normally made my eyes glaze over, it was so boring.

Anyhow, the book outlined all the evidence he had found that the fabulous Arabian oil fields had passed their peak. They pump seawater down into the oil-bearing rock formation, to keep it from collapsing. And then they have to have big processing plants which separate the oil from salt water that comes back up out of the wells. For example.

Now, the Ghawar oil field has been producing oil, huge amounts of oil, for most of a century, and it is likely that the ‘tail’ on that production curve will be quite long as well. But it is destined to taper off, not increase. The Saudis can no longer simply ‘open the tap’ to manipulate worldwide oil prices. Increasingly, it is Iran and Russia that can do that.

So this Aramco announcement fits in with the big picture. Maybe they’ll just unwind the whole operation into a royalty trust…

I sort of doubt that ALL the ice will melt. But have no idea. The climate modelers (serious ones) are predicting a few degrees’ temperature rise from air pollution. And temperature bounced a few degrees back in 2001, when they grounded most of the world’s aircraft and they stopped filling the sky with trails. On the long-term, we can see a SLIGHT trend of ice melting (and of course the difference between ice and water is less than one degree) … so there are lots of variables there. Even before you include a variable sun. Over the next century or so? Pfft, no idea.

Our little planet sits at just the right distance from the sun, like mama bear’s porridge in Goldilocks. Absent a DRASTIC change in the sun’s output, it will likely continue to have water in all its forms.

Of course, the politicians are all completely wrong about it. The assholes. Politics is not science. Both sides, the deniers and the cheerleaders.

I’d be more worried about things like the global political-financial fabric coming unraveled, and WWIII and such. And overfishing, topsoil degradation, and the more insidious forms of pollution, like the crap spewing from Fukushima.

Speaking of distance to the Sun. In the latest (incredibly crappy) Star Wars movie, (“spoilers” following) the Nazi look alike (so predictable after Hollywood Jews got their hands on the Star Wars concept) bad guys load their planetary weapon by sucking the energy out of the Sun of the local planetary system. While the bad guys are doing that our brave heroes are running around on the surface of the planet complaining about how cold it is. After a while the bad guys have nearly completed sucking the Sun dry… yet the planetary surface temperature remains the same, despite an almost extinguished sun, and no adverse affects take place (such as distortion of gravity etc etc) until the rebels blast the evil Nazi contraption and some kind of planetary implosion/earthquakes kick in.

The US public is being dumbed down on the climate issue and is not being told about the seriousness of such events as methane releases from the arctic or acidification of the oceans.

The FoxNews crowd screams about how climate hoaxes are being shoved down their throat every day. Yet it’s rare to even see or hear from an actual climate scientist in the US . I can’t remember the last time I saw an interview with a climate scientist on US media.

Here’s an update summary of climate change research which is constantly updated by Prof. Guy McPherson-

It is interesting that England is having a brutal winter while much of the US is having a mild winter. This phenomenon seems to occur regularly. My guess is that as the cold polar air moves south on one side of the planet it creates a low pressure region which draws warmer air northward on the other side of the planet.

You can see part of the THC in this view, the “Gulf Stream”. It carries quite a bit of heat, affecting the weather in northern Europe and England. Sometimes it stretches out more toward Europe and sometimes, like now, it just meanders around in the Atlantic.

Coordinated attacks across multiple nations by Syrian and Iraqi refugees that came in with the battering ram eh? And then police action against far right anti-Muslim nationalists protesting the coordinated attacks (that most likely included a very large percent of nusrats and IS-rats)?

“Putin is a master chess player. Our leaders can’t play monopoly, much less, chess, with him.” Of course not! Our rulers have people like George W. Bush as their puppet President! Think about that for a second. US Elites put a guy like “Dubaya” into the White House. Georege W. Bush, even though he is a member of a VERY powerful crime family AND he has a Daddy who was US President himself could not get even ONE job offer after graduating from Harvard Business School! And “Dubaya” went on 53 job interviews! Nope, US elites are a lot like the royal families at the turn of the 20th Century: overindulged, overinbred, protected and coddled despite failure after failure after failure. I’m amazed that “Dubaya” can even dress himself, let alone go toe to toe with Vladimir Putin. In a recent post, Elaine mentioned her relative who founded that secret Yale fraternity (with OPIUM money) known as “The Numbskulls and Boneheads”. They are a good case in point. Most of these “stars”, if put in a merit-based economy and job market would be homeless, unemployed dumpster divers. Seriously, Let me ask as an open ended question. If you strip George W, Bush of his family connections, but keep everything else the same, what in the HELL kind of employer would hire him??

The right wing in Europe is going to just explode now. Perhaps that was what the geopolitical engineers of the ‘deep state’ wanted to happen. Probably was.

In other news, Russia is no longer the extreme political ‘left’. Still socialist, of course, but not like the rabid communist era. Perhaps they can reach a ‘detente’… ? Lead by example, remind Sweden et al, of their recent happy socialist past. Or just go ahead and start WWIII.

Just watched this piece by Graham Phillips. Thought it good. School number 7 in Lugansk.

#22 ziff,
If you’ve ever worked with data, and images, you’ll know that the colors are utterly and completely arbitrary.

I occasionally look at the ‘nullschool’ site, they base their image on satellite and earth-based data, but it is the product of a computer climate model. YMMV. You can change the view and layers if you click on ‘earth’ down in the lower left corner. Or you can click and drag the planet around for a different perspective. My only complaint is that it’s slow to fill in the update.http://earth.nullschool.net/about.html

One of the BIG problems with climate science is that it requires input from a variety of scientific disciplines ie biology, physics, chemistry, meteorology, astronomy, geology, etc etc.

And even if an individual scientist (say in historical geology) is one of the brightest in his profession, he will probably NOT be able to understand a lot of stuff from the other disciplines. So it’s really difficult for any one scientist or group to grasp the entire story of what is happening in climate change.

One of the problems is that physical scientists are so conservative in presenting conclusions to the public that the standard IPCC stuff is nearly 10 YEARS out of date. Yes, extremely conservative in any kind of pronouncements to the public- who are confused when scientific conclusions change with new studies and evidence.

What Guy McPherson does is integrate the findings from different scientific disciplines and climate study institutions and present it all as one big ongoing process so it can be better understood.

And the studies are NOT fixed. The understandings and conclusions on climate change will change as new studies and data emerge.

Gail is a real bloodhound as she probes and analyzes to put the big picture together. Lots of intellectual fuel here. And excellent commentary.

She is also a regular on Zerohedge.

PS
Guy McPherson has a background as conservation biologist- which makes him a perfect generalist to tabulate all the latest studies and findings- and yes to make tentative conclusions that outfits such as the IPCC won’t attempt.

I read Gail’s blog as well. And The Automatic Earth. I think their analysis is correct, and that the economic/financial system will collapse in the near future, before climate change is really a ‘thing’. I knew them both from The Oil Drum. The politicians tend to start wars when their money games fail..

I no longer pay attention to McPherson. Though he has maybe chosen a good spot to survive climate change in New Mexico (I assume he’s still there). Only thing to worry about there is drought… NM is mostly desert already, and it can be, and has been, one of the driest spots on Earth.

As for the “big picture”, there are several factors which make it hard to predict where the climate will go. Elaine has talked about the Sun, and this last sunspot cycle was the most anemic of the last ten cycles or more. Historically, low sunspot counts have corresponded with cold climate. The reason(s) for this are not entirely clear. That habitable zone in the Wikipedia article is also a guess, by the way. We may not be so close to its inner edge as it says.

Another factor is water. Water is sometimes a greenhouse gas, and sometimes it is ice, which reflects light off into space. It makes clouds, which trap heat, but also reflect light. The effects vary wildly with cloud type. And where water vapor is present, its ‘greenhouse effect’ is stronger than that of CO2 or methane. Water in the oceans moves heat around, and absorbs/releases large amounts of heat when ice melts or freezes. All these effects make computer climate modeling a very complex and inexact art form.

From the geological record, we know that there have been periods of much more ice, and intervals of much less ice than we have now. I personally think we will have somewhat less ice, and higher sea levels, later in this century. Elaine thinks more ice.

So, to get to the bottom line: can this planet and its climate support nine billion of us, living like Ozzie and Harriet, having 2½ kids and all of them driving gas guzzlers up and down the Interstate every day? Almost certainly not. Will climate change kill off all 7 billion current population? That seems doubtful as well. Humans are more crafty than rats, which are notoriously hard to exterminate.

2.5 million years of climate instability trending towards Ice Ages all of which last longer than brief Interglacials! So the ‘new dogma’ of ‘hotter and hotter’ climate clashes hugely with relentless history of Ice Ages and thus needs tremendous amounts of proof.

Which doesn’t exist. It isn’t remotely as warm as during the Minoan Warm Era. It was quite warm back then. Ports used by Romans, even, are on dry land now due to lower oceans.

Minoan ports, even more so.

Humans evolved very rapidly compared to many other creatures thanks entirely to the Ice Ages. No Ice Ages=we would be swinging through jungles eating bananas.

The NAKED apes are creatures that love hot, hot weather and our very rapid evolution is due to cold, cold weather forcing us all to change rapidly, 90% of this most important parts of which were our brains, struggling to cope with the disaster of these Ice Ages.

And think how ‘evolution’ works: those who didn’t have the brains to cope with the cold DIED and had no surviving children.

One of the amazing things about evolution is how the hammer of death causes change.

Any humanoid living nearer to the glaciers underwent severe stresses and lots of deaths to evolve very rapidly as did ALL the Ice Age critters. Some of these died off when the last Ice Age ended thanks mainly to humans.

But in the extreme north, for example, the Ice Age winners continued to live onwards such as polar bears who are extremely clever hunters, for example, not to mention, scary animals of great danger to even humans if they are not heavily protected.

blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2016/02/12/gold-just-hit-a-record-high-priced-in-barrels-of-oil/
What they should’ve said is “Oil expressed in ounces of gold, has never cost so cheap”
The mention of gold as money is taboo !!!
All that happened before was just a political game: reduce the price of oil, collapse the Russian economy, then raise the price of oil.
But these prices were in dollars, and gold became cheaper with the oil and the oil price remained the same in ounces of gold.
This allowed Putin to sell oil at a reduced price, convert declining number of dollars for the same quantity of gold. And if oil goes up, then the gold would go up, which defeats the purpose of the whole operation of destroying the Russian economy.
But now the price of oil has fallen in gold terms. A real deflation.